There are many situations in which photographs or videos are taken and are used as an aid to documenting or providing information related to specific business functions or applications, such as in performing automobile repair estimates, determining automobile insurance claim settlements, in making real estate sales promotional materials, performing remote or out-patient medical diagnosis and treatments, etc. In many cases, the number of photographs or images that are or that need to be collected can be quite large, and the handling of these photographs can become tedious and time consuming because each of the photographs needs to be labeled or annotated with other information that is ultimately used as part of the business application to properly analyze the photograph.
For example, generating automobile repair estimates (either as part of a repair estimate process or as part of an insurance claim settlement) usually involves an adjustor traveling to a damaged vehicle, wherever it is located, and documenting the damage to the vehicle to enable a repair estimate to be generated or an insurance claim to be processed. A typical part of this documentation process involves the adjustor taking various images or photographs of the vehicle and, in particular, of the damaged portions of the vehicle, using a camera device. These photographs are then later uploaded to a computer device, such as to a database or to a hard drive on a personal computer, where the adjustor manually labels the photos with information indicating, for example, the portion of the vehicle depicted in the photo (also referred to herein as the image pose) and the some vehicle identification (such as a vehicle identification number or VIN, a make, model and year of the vehicle, a license number of the vehicle, etc.) that is needed to document the identity of the vehicle depicted in the photographs or videos. Typically, this photograph or video saving and documentation process also requires the adjustor to record the date and time that the photo, image or video was taken, stored to the database, and/or labeled with the additional data.
However, in a typical day, an adjustor may take multiple photographs of numerous vehicles and may not download or transfer the pictures until the end of the after all of the pictures have been taken. However, the pictures may remain on the camera device for days or weeks. As a result, it is easy for the adjustor to lose track of which photographs go with which vehicle identifier, and in some cases, may not be able to tell which set of photographs are associated with the same vehicle. For example, the adjustor may not be able to tell to which of a series of vehicles for which pictures were taken by the camera that a photograph of an odometer reading or a license plate belongs. Still further, this labeling process may take the adjustor tens of seconds to a couple of minutes for each photo or each group of photos, adding to the time it takes the adjustor to document the damage to the vehicle. Still further, when documenting vehicle photos, different adjustors typically annotate the photos with slightly or sometime significantly different labeling text or abbreviations, which are not common across the industry. Thus, it may be difficult for another person viewing the photograph at a different time to actually determine the labeling information of a photograph. This inconsistent labeling leads to confusion and poor documentation, slowing down the repair or insurance claim settlement process.